1330 10 DECEMBER 2021 • VOL 374 ISSUE 6573 science.org SCIENCEPHOTO: MICHAL FATTAL/BACKYARD/REDUXBy Thomas E. LevyS
hortly after the 1967 Six-Day War
between Israel and a coalition of
its Arab neighbors, the Israeli poet
Yehuda Amichai visited the newly
unified city of Jerusalem, later de-
scribing it as “a port city on the shore
of eternity” ( 1 ). The poem pays tribute to
the metaphorical role played by the land-
locked city, referencing its deep-time his-
tory and its intersectionality with the God
of the three monotheistic faiths—Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam.
Jerusalem and its history are closely
linked to how people—ranging from scien-
tists to religious practitioners to atheists—
have imagined this mountain settlement
over time. In his new book, Under Jeru-
salem, journalist Andrew Lawler seeks to
unpack how the story of the city of Jerusa-
lem, with its amazing underground world
of ancient tunnels, roads, buildings, sewage
works, and buried artifacts, is told in rela-
tion to the people who have populated itARCHAEOLOGYfor longer than 5000 years. This ambitious
book traces more than 150 years of con-
tinuous archaeological investigation of the
world’s most excavated city.
In Lawler’s view, the social identity of
Jerusalem’s storytellers—that is, whether
they see themselves primarily as archae-
ologists, historians, theologians,
university professors, activists,
or politicians—largely deter-
mines how they confront the
city’s buried past. He therefore
pays careful attention to the
nationality, ethnicity, political
leanings, and socioeconomic
standing of the individuals who
appear in his account.
Lawler begins his story in 1863
with the earliest systematic in-
vestigation of the city, conducted
by French senator Louis-Félicien
Joseph Caignart de Saulcy. While excavating
a large burial complex known as the Tomb
of the Kings, the amateur archaeologist
mistakenly concluded that he had found
the final burial site of the Israelite King Da-
vid and his son Solomon, setting the stage
for a series of competing digs conducted
by researchers from France, Germany, andthe United Kingdom. These endeavors, of-
ten firmly rooted in Christian perspectives
of the Holy Land, brought renewed interest
to Palestine, a forgotten corner of the dying
Ottoman Empire.
Contemporary standard practices for ex-
ploring archaeological sites focus on care-
ful surface-down excavations. However, in
the 1860s, in an effort to locate the remains
of King David’s palace, two young British
military men, Charles Wilson and Charles
Warren, used tunneling methods to explore
Jerusalem’s labyrinth of underground pas-
sages, channels, and buildings. A number
of subsequent excavators, most of them Is-
raeli, eventually followed suit.
Lawler interrogates the complex ideo-
logical motivations that compel the region’s
two Indigenous peoples, Jews and Arabs,
to explore and alter the city. Jewish inves-
tigators are often motivated by a desire to
explore clues to their heritage that lurk
underground. Their efforts are frequently
deeply interwoven with ideas about Jewish
sovereignty in Jerusalem today. For Arab
interpreters , it is the aboveground Islamic
monuments that most often resonate with
their identity and spur their investigations.
Under Jerusalem highlights the numer-
ous archaeological atrocities that have been
carried out in this contested city. These in-
clude the Jordanian destruction of the Jew-
ish Quarter and its 27 synagogues in the 1948
war, the Israeli bulldozing of the Mugrabi
Quarter adjacent to the Western Wall of the
Temple Mount shortly after the 1967 war,
and the currently occupied houses that have
been undermined by archaeological tunnel-
ing. Some of these incidents reflect the evo-
lution of archaeological practice,
others the religion and politics of
the actors—but all reflect a desire
to use Jerusalem for the perceived
good of the groups to which the
investigators belong.
Lawler hints that a commit-
ment to science-based archaeol-
ogy by a new generation of Israeli
researchers, coupled with inno-
vative underground excavation
techniques, may herald a more
objective telling of the history of
the world’s most contested city.
This offers a distinctive opportunity for ar-
chaeologists to write a new narrative of the
“city of peace” from the ground up. jREFERENCES AND NOTES- Y. Amichai, “Yerushalayim ir namal al sefat ha-nez.ah.
in Yerushalayim” (1967).
10.1126/science.abn0362Visitors travel through the Western Wall tunnels under
the Old City in Jerusalem in December 2009.Science, politics, identity, and conflict converge
in investigations of the city of peace
BOOKS et al.
The reviewer is at the Department of Anthropology,
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Email: [email protected]Under Jerusalem:
The Buried History
of the World’s
Most Contested City
Andrew Lawler
Doubleday, 2021. 464 pp.Interpreting Jerusalem